Monday, 16 March 2015

Crook & The Bluff - Down To The Styx, album review

Desert Doors Blues

Described as playing psychedelic western blues, I’ll go along with the freak cowboy insinuation, especially when listening to the haunting, guitar tripping opener Where, and later on the far-out Honey. The blues get their conventional, though none-the-less equally atmospheric showcase on third Devilish Deeds. There is at times in lead singer Kirk Dath a deep emotive boom ala Jim Morrison [though in no sense a tonal copy] and I am also reminded of John Grant singing in The Czars. The dual guitar wok of Dath and partner Tad Wilford [Kirk and Tad – these guys are cowboys] is the narrative hook, at times blues-slow – Desert Blues – and at others reverberating and resonating across the broad topography of their wilder musical desert, for example the album’s title track which really does begin like a Doors’ brooding landscape [rattlesnakes instead of lizards] and where the fuzzed guitar eventually erupts, and then goes psychedelic-berserk.


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